Archive for August, 2009
Pirate Chick WIP
This is a WIP of my most recent project that I’ve been working on in between some freelance and mining ;). Reference of what I’m going off of is below. I’m hoping to finish the corset by tomorrow, and the shirt by friday and I suppose I need to do some pants as well. Argh, I guess I have a lot more to do that I was thinking. I’m still debating if I want to texture it, or just keep it as a clay render. Maybe keep things procedural?
Pirate Chick
RIB files
Holy cow batman RIB files are sweeet. AKA Renderman Interface Bytestream. OK so I’ve known about RIB files for awhile now… I am a lighter/renderer ya know. But I have yet to really do anything with them, till recently. I knew they contained information of a scene to be a rendered, you know all the generals you read about in your spare time, but I would have never thought just how much it can do.
First off, there are two kinds of RIB files: ASCII encoded RIB files and binary encoded RIB files. A binary RIB file is smaller than its ASCII encoded equivalent, but an ASCII RIB file has the advantage of being editable in any text editor or word processor.
How does one render a RIB file. Simple :). It’s all via command line. Type in: % renderdl file.rib. And VOILA. You can even set whatever settings you want, just like a .bat file for Mentalray in Max or Maya. You can tell it how many threads to use for rendering, how many processors to use, or even something like use all processors except N amount. The best part?… err well rather one of the best parts, you can add` -tiling‘ which tells it the tiling mode to use when splitting an image for multiprocess rendering. What’s even better than that? You can export a particle simulation in a RIB and have someone else light and again some one else render. AWESOME.
You can even tell it to print progress messages to see how bad the machine hates you.
And of course I’m rendering all this shtuff through 3Delight, which is a renderman package. Why not PRman? I don’t have the dough :(.
The unfortunate thing of RIB’s, Renderman, Command line? They often need a lot of programming knowledge. I’ve had some so far-enough to keep my head above water, but I can see that big ole monster wave in the distance headed my way.
https://renderman.pixar.com/products/rispec/rispec_pdf/RISpec3_2.pdf
Is a pretty much a must read for renderman users. It might take a doctorate to be able to understand a couple places, but for the most part it’s not *too* bad.
Writing shaders in Renderman and Mentalray isn’t too bad, but it gets pretty crazy when you try to do something that isn’t standard like a blinn or sss. If you want to do something physically based (accurate) heh good luck and send me the file when you are done :D.
I think I will stick to lighting and modeling and let those with the pHD’s write those shaders.
…I still prefer Mental Ray.
Nurbs? Really?
I’m a poly man. 100% born and bred. I use it for everything, until recently that is-to an extent of course. I understand why movies use it-for now. It renders really nicely and there is no faceting (if done correctly). You get really smooth and elegant curves instantly. In fact, it’s hard not to get a curve. However, with today’s technology ravaging on, and computers being able to handle more, the era of using nurbs for the finished product is slowly coming to an end.
Anyways, why I’ve been getting into nurbs-to an extent. I’ve been working on a pirate character, “Pirate Chick” is her name for now, and she has a lot of curvy clothing. I started with polies, but I couldn’t nail the form and I couldn’t get rid of the lumpiness. So I started in Zbrush with the thought of retopologizing. Same issues. Stupid form and weight. So I used nurbs. I drew one cv curve with the general swoopyness, duped in, moved in up and around her waist and lofted. Voila! Instant dress. Tweaked points, added points fiddled around, and finally converted to polies, and added detail where I wanted it. Why did I not leave it as nurbs? 1)It’s easier for me to get detail where I want it with polies, 2)wireframes out of Maya would have been a pain. :D. As hard as it is for me to admit it, something that was taking me a few hours with polies only took me half an hour with nurbs.
So what have I been doing for the last few hours? Troubleshooting those freaking nurbs. Everything has to be so perfect or they won’t loft or revolve correctly. Making a face out of curves was much easier than doing complex folds. Maybe I’ll leave the complexities to polies and get the basic flow with nurbs.
Now to try and figure out how to model hair.
Also, the make live tool in Maya is *the bomb* Zbrushes retop tool can suck it.
